I hear you were called a cultural-Marxist-unbiblical-anti-capitalist-socialist-ignorant-anti-gospel person?
Ouch, this hurt! This stuff can be exhausting and frustrating for those of us who use social media as part of a teaching vocation, for fun, and for commentary. Attacks on people’s reputations, experience, traditions, and intelligence have become quite common, especially against black and brown church leaders and scholars.
A pertinent term here is “Cancel Culture.” It is now part of a subculture on social media. The use of the term exploded in the last three years. Sarah Saccomanno describes “cancel culture” as a type of “unofficial system of boycotting… seemingly unpopular opinions or views on the internet. With its sources originating from the mega-platform Twitter, Cancel Culture backs on the concepts of Groupthink, Political Correctness, and the shift in the political spectrum.”[1] And ProfessorLisa Nakamura (UMich) describes it as “a cultural boycott” directed at depriving someone of recognition, respect, and even livelihood.[2]
In public discourse, it seems that everyone, progressives, conservatives, libertarians, capitalists, socialists, religious, and skeptics alike engage in the logic of canceling.
My concern here is more limited to how this is playing out among those who identify as Christian conservatives and evangelicals. The issue of self-identification is tricky though. The fact that someone identifies as evangelical and has a cancel-culture attitude doesn’t necessarily make it so. Some identify as evangelicals due to more precise historical-theological commitments, while others are cultural evangelicals that are part of a type of civil religion. One of Jerry Falwell Sr. ‘achievements’ via the Moral Majority movement in the early 80s was to rebrand his fundamentalism as evangelical. So, there’s that.
Communicative Unkindness
The ethos of “cancel culture” works through a communicative malice, namely, slander. For instance, the “liberal left” discourse is abrasive, with grotesque characterizations, seeking the public demotion of their targets—it is exclusion by acclamation. Could the Christian right be accused of the same thing?
What concerns me (as one who dabbles multiple socio-religious spaces) is that an analogous logic lurks in social media discourses among evangelical conservatives. The Christian anti-liberal right appears to use the same script. It is equally treacherous. It comes with spiritual robes, rhetorically appropriating terms like “gospel” and “biblical” as markers for judgment of who might be in or out of their Christianity. Subsequently “concerns” against other Christians’ views are levied, and inevitably genetic fallacies follow.[3]
Don’t get me wrong. I am a theologian by vocation. I’ve been ordained in two evangelical denominations. Part of my job as a servant of the church is to be concerned with orthodoxy (right doctrine), orthopraxis (right practice), and orthopathos (right virtues) All of which, admittedly, I have fallen short at one time or another. But in these times concern for equipping all the saints, and valuing the fidelity of black and brown theological traditions that use multidisciplinary approaches for theological reflection and the social transformation is not there.
What I see coming from certain sectors of conservative Christians is paternalism and fearmongering. The guilty-by-association logic is so pervasive that no academic understanding, no formal theological wisdom, nor competent socio-political knowledge is needed to validate an argument, for there is no argumentation. It is not required. There is only holy denunciation, declarations, and statements.
Increasingly more prevalent are passive-aggressive attacks upon fellow Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian believers whose gospel lens is not principally articulated with an individualist soteriology. Gossip is spread against Christian leaders and scholars who, in my estimation, have a thoughtful doctrine of sin. Their doctrine of sin is quite robust as it confronts personal, communal, legal, and political manifestations. Nevertheless, accusations are levied against those who do not employ a fundamentalist hermeneutic or emphasize Anglo-centric priorities of doing theology and confronting social ills.
Mistrust is seemingly at every turn. Suspicions are raised against those who do not assume a pietist model of Christ versus culture. Critique of Christian nationalism among a predominantly white evangelical demographic is tantamount to heresy.[4] These brothers/sisters project themselves as the de facto magisterium in evangelicalism, despite the fact that their own communities’ history is stained with an ideological use of doctrine, slavery, racism, sexism, and abuse of power.[5]
In these discursive environments, it does not take long to see the unfortunate commonalities between the progressive left and the Christian conservative right. Both cancel-cultures wield the same sword of ultimatum: ex-communication.
All this is deeply exhausting. I lost count of students, church leaders, and pastors who in private conversations express how the emerging fundamentalisms in their denominations/seminaries/churches worry them, and how difficult it is to deal with the attitude of so many leaders that they love and respect.
Sigh.
From Scripture, Confessions, and Catechisms
I’ve found direction and discernment, not only in the fountain of Scripture but also in the history of Christian thought.
It is a fundamental virtue of the people of God to be truth-tellers. The 9th Commandment states: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Ex. 20:16.) The issues at heart are at least two: speech that is contrary to reality (falsehoods) and speech that misrepresents the truth (slander). This moral mandate finds its origin in the God who is all truth and calls Israel to emulate this communicative virtue in all its relationships. Lies are offenses against the truth. Lies betray covenantal faithfulness.
It is our ethical imperative the preservation of the well-being and reputation of our neighbor, especially for our sisters and brothers in the faith. The Christian foundation of godly communication is ultimately based on Jesus’s summary of the law: loving God with every fiber of our beings and loving our neighbor enough to want to preserve their integrity in the same way we care for our reputation.
St. Augustine considered at length the issue of lying. In his book Against Lying, he lists eight kinds of lies. Be warned, the first five could hit a nerve.
- The lie of the one who teaches religion.
- The lie that benefits no one and harms somebody.
- The lie that helps oneself and hurts somebody.
- The lies that are solely for the pleasure of lying and deceiving.
- The lie said for the desire to please.
In Martin Luther’s The Large Catechism (1529), he considers the judicial context of the command, it “pertains to the public courts of justice, where a poor, innocent man is accused and oppressed by false witness in order to be punished in his body, property, or honor” (257). He then provides three positive applications of this command.
- We should keep our neighbors’ rights and prevent deception.
- On the “spiritual jurisdiction,” we should preach the unadulterated Word of God and expect opposition (262).
- It forbids all communicative sins by which our neighbor might be hurt or offended, for false witness is a sin of speech.[6]
The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) aptly states: “The ninth commandment requires the maintaining and promoting of truth between man and man, and of our own and our neighbor’s good name, especially in witness-bearing.” Therefore, it “forbids whatsoever is prejudicial to truth, or injurious to our own, or our neighbor’s, good name. (Q. 77-78)
I lament that even among my own people, we find something very different. In the canceling temples, we find the antagonisms of ideology, tribes with holiness codes, and hypocritical appeals to ultimate goods, justice, or utopias. In the canceling kingdom, the righteous will live by slandering alone.
[1] https://medium.com/@sarah.saccomanno/cancel-culture-cancel-actions-not-people-242e2aa1d84a
[2] As cited in NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/style/is-it-canceled.html
[3] “A critic uses the Genetic Fallacy if the critic attempts to discredit or support a claim or an argument because of its origin (genesis) when such an appeal to origins is irrelevant.” See https://iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#Genetic
[4] Perry and Whitehead define Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework—a collection of myths, symbols, narratives and value systems—that idealize and advocates a fusion of Christianity and American civic life.” Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), 10.
[5] Cf. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars. University Alabama Press (2017).
[6] Luther observes: “It is a common vice of human nature that everyone would rather hear evil than good about his neighbor.” The irony, Luther observes, is that “evil as we are, we cannot tolerate having evil spoken of us; we want the golden complements of the world” (264). In terms of gossip, Luther says: “Those are called backbiters who are not content just to know but rush ahead and judge. Learning a bit of gossip about someone else, they spread it into every corner, relishing and delighting in it like pigs that roll in the mud and root around in it with their snouts. This is nothing else than usurping the judgment and office of God… Whoever therefore ventures to accuse his neighbor of such guilt assumes as much authority as the emperor and all magistrates. For though you do not wield the sword, you use your venomous tongue to the disgrace and harm of your neighbor” (267-68). Luther adds: “God forbids you to speak evil about another even though, to your certain knowledge, he is guilty. [And] All the more urgent is this prohibition if you are not sure but have it only from hearsay… if you do not trust yourself to make your charges before public authorities, then hold you tongue. Keep your knowledge to yourself…” (269-70).
